The no-whining-zone post

I just typed up a long post that slowly devolved into me whining about too many things to do, too many places to be, and not enough time to do them all. Then in consideration of you, gentle reader, I deleted the paragraphs and paragraphs of whining.

Here's what was left: three paragraphs on an interesting tour I took yesterday evening, two sentences on television, and one whine-free phrase at the end. Enjoy:

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Last night I went down to tour the Menlo Software Factory in Ann Arbor because my company is instituting the agile software development process for our new product development. I thought it would be interesting to go take a look at a company that's done that for a while, to try to get a better sense of how my group of indexing specialists will be able to best fit our work into that sort of development cycle.

It's worth checking into if you're involved at all in software or online products. It's especially interesting in that it places a great emphasis on putting all of the programmers in the same room at the same time, a sharp contrast to the "outsource to India" method that seemed to sweep through everybody in the last decade. They also place a great emphasis on eliminating the scheduled meetings and e-mail deluges that are often a great impediment to productivity for most programmers working in the corporate world.

But rather than me trying to tell you about agile, in the unlikely case that you really are interested in software development processes you can click on the Wikipedia article that I linked to above or sign up for a tour here: Menlo Tours. The tour was definitely interesting and well worth my time. And if nothing else, they also offer free pizza with the tour. This likely ensures sign ups from lots of hungry and poor University of Michigan students.

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I must confess that I watched the last half-hour of the Damages season finale with Monique. Good heavens, those people are not very nice to one another. I don't think Miss Manners would approve.

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... still enjoying a clean desktop...

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